Oracle Blog

Thursday Feb 02, 2012

I wouldn't last more than ten minutes teaching in an American high school. Not because the little monsters would frighten me, but because it would take about five minutes for me to grab one of them by the throat and slam them up against the chalkboard. And another five minutes for the principal to walk me out the front gate.

I went to a Catholic High School in Peru. Our Freshman class had 120 students, 40 to a classroom. Only 96 graduated. I don't know what happened to those who flunked out, but those of us who graduated got a phenomenal education. I didn't have a challenging class again until my junior year at Berkeley. Unfortunately, America doesn't value education much and, according to I, Cringely, that disdain has now spread our universities.

Oddly enough, we are really good with desktops. Or rather, with virtual desktops. Walk away from your desktop without even entering a decimal point into the cell you were adding to a spreadsheet, hop on a jet plane to Prague, walk into a friend's office, log in to his desktop, and there's your spreadsheet with the cell that's missing the decimal point.

Desktop virtualization rocks. It not only improves the user experience, it makes life much easier for the sysadmin. You get to manage huge groups of desktops as if they were one. And to totally cool things, as you'll see below. Some of you probably remember the days of walking around with a floppy disk from office to office, updating an application one user at a time. Desktop virtualization is about as diametrically opposed from that as you can get.

If you want to know how far it has come, and what it takes to implement, check out some of these resources:

Show this one to your boss. All the factors you need to consider when designing a virtual desktop infrastructure that can deliver a Windows 7 desktop standard operating environment to either 500, 1,000, or 1,500 users. Covers architecture, capacity planning, network configuration, and availability.

Michael Dan describes the incredible energy and cost savings you can get with Oracle's SunRay Servers, and demonstrates the product features and production chain innovations that qualify the SunRay 3 thin client for its EnergyStar rating and the 2011 Good Design Award.

You can set up Oracle's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure so that users can switch between OS's on their desktops as easily as selecting a different tab. Or access their desktop environment not only from their laptop, but also from the PC at Ray's Custom Bike Shop (provided Ray had the VDI client installed). Craig Bender and Brad Lackey, who were Microsoft Professionals before they worked on Oracle's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, describe the components of the VDI 3.2 system, and the features that make it easier, cheaper, and safer for sysadmins to manage. Plus how it works with a global cloud.

Recent Awards

In fact, we do desktop virtualization so well, that we've won several awards. Most recently: